Media applications which include video and audio database management, database browsing and identification are undergoing explosive growth and are expected to continue to grow. To address this growth, there is a need for a comprehensive solution related to the problem of creating a multimedia sequence database and identifying, within such a database, a particular multimedia sequence or sequences that match the content that is played out with or without media content distortions. Applications for such a comprehensive solution include video database mining, copyright content detection for video hosting web-sites, contextual advertising placement, and broadcast monitoring of video programming and advertisements.
There is a need for scalable search systems for large scale multi-media content identification and monitoring. Television channel organizations, advertising agencies, and other commercial and personal interests desire a system and method for monitoring and searching of broadcast television shows, films, and commercials and online broadcast of various cable and internet networks programming. Another application is monitoring and gathering statistics for large audiences viewing of various media on TVs, computers, and portable devices. Other popular applications of a content search and monitoring system are related to improving user experiences, enabling social communication, and various forms of advertising. To provide such applications, content to be identified or monitored is compared to content stored in one or more large databases of videos and media content. This represents a massive database search and correlation problem. To be of value the search systems should support real time database searching, monitoring, and updating. The sophistication, flexibility, and performance that are desired exceed the capabilities of current generations of software based solutions, in many cases, by an order of magnitude.